social theory

Share this page:

In part two of a four part series, this Transnational Lives podcast focuses upon social theory, language, and society and the roles they play in diversity. In this podcast, Sheryl Means, a graduate student within the College of Education, Anna Stone, a graduate student in English, and Jonathan Tinnin, a graduate student in English, speak with Otto Santa Ana about his work within sociolinguistics, his focus on English and Spanish, and how his interest in this field began. Otto Santa Ana is Professor at the César Chávez Department of Chicana & Chicano Studies, University of California, Los Angeles and his work, spanning across many platforms, focuses on the interplay between language, society, and immigration.

Connecting with people from around the world is much easier now than it has ever been before. With the internet, phones, and fast travel, we can build relationships and networks in new ways - breaking through the barriers of national boundaries. This development of relationships and their influence despite national borders is known as transnationalism, a social phenomenon that we will be focusing on throughout a four part series. Join the conversation as we kick off the series with Lauren Copeland, a graduate student from the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran, a graduate student in Anthropology, and Agata Grzelczak, a graduate student in Hispanic Studies, as they interview Nina Glick-Schiller, one of the pioneers of transnational studies. Glick-Schiller’s research has spanned across her career, influencing scholars both in the humanities and social studies.

Justice has been a reference point for radical and critical geographers for more than 40 years. Geographers’ engagements with issues of justice, however, have always been defined by wariness toward political philosophies of justice. These are variously considered too liberal, too distributive in their orientation, or too universalizing. The wariness, in short, indicates the parameters that define the prevalent spatial imaginary of radical and critical human geography: self-consciously oppositional, concerned with the production of structural relations, sensitive to context and difference. Barnett explore two overlapping strands of contemporary political philosophy and political theory that have recently developed arguments for ‘the priority of injustice’ in the elaboration of democratic theory.

Anna Secor, professor of geography, social theory, and gender and women’s studies at the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, has been named the university’s first Hajja Razia Sharif Sheikh Islamic Studies Professor.

Every spring the Committee on Social Theory offers the team-taught seminar—always with four professors. Previous course themes/names for the seminar have included “Law, Sex, and Family” “Autobiography,” and “Security.” But previous seminars may not have spoken so directly to the professors’ personal backgrounds as “Transnational Lives” does with this team of four.